Editorial
The Gist
- AI is rewriting inbox rules. Apple, Google and Yahoo are increasingly replacing brand-crafted subject lines and preview text with AI-generated summaries.
- Marketers lose control. Preview text and subject lines, once prime real estate for brand personality, are now overridden by AI extractions and deal cards.
- Trust and accuracy at risk. AI-inserted errors like wrong discounts and expirations damage customer relationships and may open the door to legal challenges.
After a long period of relatively stable, if imperfect, email inbox environments, the past few years have seen a flurry of investments by Apple, Google and Yahoo, who impact the vast majority of emails sent. (Microsoft has been almost entirely quiet.) While the first wave of this innovation was all about privacy and the second all about deliverability, the current wave is all about AI.
Across industries and professions, marketers are among the biggest adopters of AI, but the AI that’s being used by inbox providers is largely working against marketers. Nowhere is that more evident when it comes to the various kinds of AI summaries, which are gradually replacing carefully crafted brand copy.
Table of Contents
- The First Casualty: Preview Text
- The Second Casualty: Subject Lines???
- Could It Get Even Worse for Email Marketing?
- Where Is This Going for Email User Experience?
The First Casualty: Preview Text
The first place inboxes started using AI summaries was in the place of preview text, which is the text that generally appears after or directly underneath subject lines in inboxes before an email is opened. Prior to AI summaries, brands could control what was displayed as preview text by managing their preheader text, which is the first HTML text that appears in the coding of an email.
Today, the preview text of promotional emails is routinely replaced by AI-generated copy, with major inbox providers each doing something different:
- Google uses Automatic Extraction to automatically apply Annotations code to promotional emails that replace preview text with deal summaries, product carousels and single image previews. While brands can add Annotations to their emails, they’re not always honored. Neither brands nor users can opt out of Google using Automatic Extraction.
Google’s Automatic Extraction overrides brand-crafted preview text with AI-generated deal summaries that can misrepresent offers, undermine marketing goals and erode trust with subscribers. - Yahoo uses its own form of Automatic Extraction to apply schema code that’s nearly identical to Google’s Annotations. While brands can add schema to their emails, they’re not always honored. And as with Google, neither brands nor users can’t opt out of Yahoo using Automatic Extraction.
- Apple uses AI Summaries in the place of preview text in the inbox, with larger summaries available upon request in the email itself. Brands can’t opt out of having AI Summaries applied to their emails, but users can opt out of this functionality in Apple Mail or by turing off Apple Intelligence. However, AI Summaries are on by default in Apple apps that support Apple Intelligence.
- Apple also uses Brand Message Grouping for “older messages,” where they roll up all of a brand’s emails under one item in the inbox. Brands can’t opt out of having Brand Message Grouping applied to their emails, but users can opt out by selecting “List View” (rather than “Categories”), which also turns off tabs.
Sadly, by the time that AI summaries started replacing preview text, marketers had become absolute experts at writing effective and engaging preview text. They used it to extend their subject lines, bringing in additional points of interest and adding more details to build up the subject line’s content. In other cases, they’d have the subject line ask a question that the preview text would answer—or the subject line would tell a joke, with the preview text delivering the punchline.
With preview text becoming an unreliable partner in communicating the value proposition of an email, marketers have had to double-down on crafting subject lines that are not only clear and powerful, but can stand on their own. It’s a major loss, especially since inboxes like Apple Mail display twice as many characters of preview text as they do subject line text.
Related Article: Gmail’s Email 'Upgrades' Are Actually a Step Backward
The Second Casualty: Subject Lines???
But what if marketers can’t even rely on their subject lines to appear? That’s what has started to happen to marketing emails in the Yahoo Mail app. Yahoo is replacing some subject lines and their preview text with AI-generated summaries.
In the inbox view, that means a brand can only rely on their sender name to remain unchanged. While brands with shorter names can try to maximize their use of the characters allotted for from names using sender name extension strategies (as Fidelity does above), it’s an inherently limited tactic.
Marketers know how impactful their subject lines are to attracting openers who click and convert. That’s why subject lines are the most frequently A/B tested element in all of email marketing.
The prospect of marketers losing subject lines and the ability to intentionally and closely align them with the content of their emails is devastating.
Moreover, it’s unclear what problem inbox providers are trying to solve by replacing brands’ subject lines and preview text with AI summaries. While some brands occasionally get too clever with their subject lines to the point of being misleading, that’s a rare occurrence today. Plus, subscribers already have a recourse if they’ve feel a brand has tricked them into opening an email or has otherwise wasted their time—they can unsubscribe, which is easier than ever thanks to the mandating of list-unsubscribe headers by Google and Yahoo, or they can report the sender’s emails a spam.
Thus far, rather than protecting email users in some way, AI summaries have introduced inaccuracies, misrepresented offers and steamrollered over brand personality.
Related Article: Apple & Yahoo Create Worrisome Trends for Email Marketers
Could It Get Even Worse for Email Marketing?
If the major inboxes replace brands’ subject lines and preview text, is the next move to replace the content of their emails with AI summaries, too? Google has already taken a step down this road with the introduction of Deal Cards at the beginning of this year.
For emails in the Promotions tab, they’re automatically adding a Deal Card to some emails that summarize the high points of the email’s primary offer, in much the same way that deal summary Annotations do in the inbox pre-open. These Deal Cards push 40% or more of the email’s brand-crafted content out of the preview pane, which is the most valuable real estate in the inbox.
As with Automatic Extraction for annotations, brands can’t opt out of Deal Cards. And just like other outputs from Automatic Extraction, the AI-generated content is routinely incorrect, creating confusing and bad experiences for the sender’s subscribers.
It’s like forcing brands to bet on the outcome of a completely unnecessary game of Telephone—you know, that kids game where you whisper something in the ear of the person next to you and see if the message survives being conveyed down a line of people. While that game is fun, what’s not fun is that brands are being forced to bet not only money that will be lost if the AI messes up their message, but they also have to bet their relationships with their customers, if they become frustrated by those AI mistakes.
Related Articles: The Fold in the Inbox: Hard Line, Soft Line, Imaginary Line?
AI Interventions by Major Inbox Providers
How Apple, Google and Yahoo are reshaping subject lines, preview text and inbox content with AI-driven features.
| Provider | AI Feature | Impact on Marketers |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic Extraction | Replaces preview text with deal snippets, product carousels or single images—often redundant or inaccurate. | |
| Deal Cards | Pushes down email content with AI-generated offer blocks, sometimes misrepresenting discounts or expirations. | |
| Apple | AI Summaries | Substitutes preview text with machine-written summaries, risking loss of nuance and brand personality. |
| Apple | Brand Message Groupings | Collapses multiple emails into one item, replacing preview text with bulleted subject lines that reduce visibility. |
| Yahoo | Automatic Extraction | Similar to Google, replaces preview text with schema-driven summaries brands can’t reliably control. |
| Yahoo | AI Summaries in Subject Lines | Replaces both subject lines and preview text with AI-generated text, limiting brand influence to sender name only. |
Where Is This Going for Email User Experience?
Eventually, to court. That’s my guess.
Consumers have been suing brands over their email marketing lately, including The Gap, Urban Outfitters and Patagonia. Couple that with lawsuits over AI, like when Air Canada was forced to honor an against-policy refund offered by a chatbot, and it’s only a matter of time before a customer sues a retailer for false advertising or deceptive marketing practices over a discount in an AI summary that the retailer refused to honor. The customer likely won’t care or understand that the AI summary wasn’t created by the retailer and that it wasn’t honored because it was wrong.
I’m not a lawyer, but it seems the retailer would then have standing to sue the inbox provider for court fees and any other damages. Then Google, Yahoo, Apple or whichever inbox provider it is would have to explain why they’re scanning the contents of private email communications and then altering those communications.
Then again, given the incorrect discount amounts, incorrect dates, incorrect deal expirations and even scarier things I’ve seen, perhaps brands already have standing to sue inbox providers. Damage is surely being done to customer relationships. Perhaps all that’s left is for a brand or class-action group of brands to step up and try to calculate the damage that’s been done to them.
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I hope it doesn't come to that. What I do hope happens is some brands who are big advertisers on Google, Yahoo and Apple's properties express their displeasure with how their email campaigns are being undermined by AI summaries. Perhaps that kind of pressure would make Google, Yahoo and Apple realize that these features are hurting their relationships with their customers, just like they're hurting email marketers' relationships with their customers.
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